[162] Speaking in the Exposition Hall, at the great Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, on August 25th, 1893, Douglas said of his people: "To-day we number 8,000,000 (coloured) people in the United States. To-day a desperate effort is being made to blacken the character of the negro and to brand him as a moral monster. In fourteen States of this Union wild mobs have taken the place of the law. They hang, shoot and burn men of my race without law and without right." In telling words he would revert to the time "when there was but one flag in America under which the fugitive slave could be secure. When the slave had escaped from the control of his owner, and was making his way through the intervening States to the free land of the north, whether he gained the summit of the highest mountains or hid in the recesses of the deepest valleys, the fugitive could find no safe resting place. If he mingled in the teeming throngs of their busiest cities, he feared detection; if he sought solitude on their widest prairies, beneath the silent stars, he was in dread of being tracked; not until he had sighted the red-crossed Jack, and, crossing the northern lakes, had touched the strand of Canada's shore, could the slave fall upon his knees and know that at last he was free." Thus pure, unsullied in its life-story, this three-crossed Union Jack of Canada is the only flag on the continent of America which has always and ever been the "flag of freedom," a flag under which all men, as their birthright, have been born equal and free. Canadians may well, therefore, be proud of their flag, for what truer glory can be claimed for any other flag--than this, which spells out FREEDOM in its every fold? CHAPTER XXXIV. _THE FLAG OF LIBERTY._ There is yet the other ideal phase in which the Union Jack in the outer realms of the Empire and in Canada reigns supreme--that of "liberty to the people." The inborn hope which buds and blossoms in the hearts of a growing people as their energies evolve and their circumstances advance, finds its fruitage in the possession of mastery over their own homes, and thus a nation's desire for liberty is concentrated in the absorbing dream of self-government. It was this spirit which spoke in the old English colonies in America when they averred, in their address to King George III., that they were "being degraded from the pre-eminent rank of _English_ freemen." The condition of a citizen in the old homeland was their highest ideal of the liberties of a people, and the only one with which, even in those times, they considered comparison could worthily be made. The history of the Union Jack in the parent land has been connected, as we have seen, not solely with national allegiance, but yet more with parliamentary government; and its several parts have been combined in union to evidence the advent of union under representative institutions.